Prisoners Encouraged By Daylight Services: Fill & Download for Free

To answer this question i will briefly explain the Afghanistan-Pakistan relations from 1947 till Soviet Invasion.Pakistan had serious territorial disputes with Afghanistan since independence 1947. Durand line is the international border still not recognised by Afghan government inherited by Pakistan from British India under international treaty & laws.Bold black line is Durand line while you can see spread of Pashtoon population across both countries.Afghanistan was the only country that voted against UN membership of Pakistan.Afghanistan funded separatists with a purpose to create Pashtunistan out of Pashtoon dominated province of Pakistan.First Prime Minister of Pakistan was assassinated by a Afghan in broad daylight in a public gathering.Prime minister of Pakistan Liaquat Ali Khan moments before his assassination standing on the rostrum.[1]Both countries fought small scale battles & border skirmishes (1949–1960) where Pakistan won decisively pushing back Afghan forces who tried to occupy key travel passes. Similar stuff is still going on but Pakistan has upper hand.Pakistani embassy was attacked by separatists in Afghanistan encouraged by government there and Pashtunistan flag was put up after removing the national flag of Pakistan.Pashtunistan postal stamp issued by Afghan Government right after Soviet took control.Afghan national radio and print media was used for Pashtunistan propaganda.Back to your questionSo we have Soviet Red army and Spetsnaz special forces deployed in a neighbouring country that has been hostile to you since creation.Millions of Afghan refugees fled towards Pakistan and were welcomed by Pakistanis as hostilities were not shared by common people.Afghan refugees waiting for camps. February 1980.Pakistan approached Islamic World with the help of 34 Muslim majority countries passed a resolution which called for unconditional withdrawal of Soviet troops. UN also passed a resolution calling for withdrawalPakistan post 1971Modern Pakistan which was restructured after East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971. There was preparation done to secure its western border by doing Tit for Tat. If Afghanistan is arming separatists to change the geography of Pakistan then we will support religious factions inside their territory who would challenge Afghan state.Prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto who ordered for this new Afghan strategyNew Afghan strategyPakistan was created for Muslims so long lasting strategy should have been to create similar mindset in Afghanistan so boundaries don’t matter as religious bond that helped Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years can also create favourable atmosphere between two Muslim majority countries.Enter Mujahideen & Afghan religious leadersAfghan Mujahideen in 1979Director ISI General Hamid Gul with Afghan leader Jalaluddin HaqqaniPakistan’s intelligence agency ISI was already helping Mujahideen to fight against brutal Soviet invasion where Red Army was killing villages after villages to curb dissidents. Kabul’s prison Pul-e-Charhi was rammed full with Afghans and executed daily.Mass grave uncovered recently in Pul-e-Charhi prison[2]After nearly a year & half CIA came on board with its Operation Cyclone to turn this resistance into full fledged insurgency.[3]Director of the ISI (Inter-Service Intelligence) Major Gen. Hamid Gul (front left) and Director of the CIA William Webster (second left) 1987 in a Mujahideen camp in Pakistan.Pakistan did what it needed to help neighbors who were suffering due to greed of few Afghan leaders who had no legitimacy to rule Afghanistan other than security provided by Soviet Union. To be honest things haven’t changed even today only the patronage is changed. Our job was to safeguard our western border and put out all those who conspired against Pakistan right from its inception.While doing that we also managed to become a nuclear state to deter any further destabilisation by our friendly neighbours, formidable Airforce, ISI-CIA collaboration equipped our intelligence apparatus, our military got the necessary modernisation and also trade increased with US & EU. Gulf countries became our key partners unlike before. It wasn’t all rosy as i am writing now but as former President Zia Ul Haq once said, “Freedom has no price” Pakistan paid dearly for that war and still doing it with more than 1.5 million Afghan refugees still living as they deem their country unsafe.Conclusion: Pakistan did what it had to do after more than two million Afghans took refuge whose leaders have been hostile to Pakistan not to the fault of innocent Afghans. Western border needed a long term solution and also Afghan ruling elite who probably still has misplaced sense of superiority needed to be taught a lesson as land of Indus won’t put up with this crap anymore.Thanks for readingFootnotes[1] How Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated by an Afghan nationalist for Independent Pashtunistan- Opinion[2] Afghanistan mass grave uncovered in Kabul[3] Our terrorists , by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

I can only speak for myself, but to me he personifies the psychopathic* cartel our media has become. I went so far in my dislike of his ilk and their sinister influence to help get him fired from the Daily Mirror.In May 2004 Piers Morgan was editor of Britain’s third biggest tabloid newspaper the Daily Mirror. As a devotee of Margaret Thatcher he had risen quickly through the ranks of Rupert Murdoch’s empire to become the youngest tabloid editor in the UK at the News of the World. When Tony Blair began his New Labour project, Morgan moved to the formerly working class Labour supporting Mirror in 1995. By the time he was PM in 1997 ‘Call me Tony’ had both titles fawning over him.Morgan had access to the top of Tony Blair’s government and liked to think he wielded huge influence via his newsroom’s routine plundering of telephone messages, massaging of financial data and general gossip. (denied by Morgan who narrowly avoided conviction for the first two).As long as they both could profit from this relationship they, like a great many senior users of this information, didn’t want to kill the golden goose, especially when geese are notoriously quick to bite back.I have long made my peace with how the wicked prosper, but this nexus of new-century information wrangling and press / politics insiderism stank, even if we didn’t notice at first becasue psychopaths are usually very charming.Most people are unable to explain or provide evidence of their instincts, but quite often those long-evolved systems for spotting threats bust through our reasoned minds and get it right. Like the public did with Piers Morgan.Morgan’s memoirs of the decade he spent getting to the court of Tony The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade were memorably described by Sam Leith of The Spectator as, "historically negligible, analytically null, morally rudderless, sloppily edited, hopelessly written, boastful, whining, sentimental, thuggish and with all the fascination of a horrible accident. Just like a red-top (tabloid) newspaper on a good day."As he said we can spot a copper-bottomed shit when we see one, and can’t take our eyes off them when they appear.His old title News of the World would later ignite a furious row over press ethics and accountability with the phone hacking scandal. And questions still remain on the nasty business of the murder of Daniel Morgan.Morgan probably knows enough to have many people keep him out of serious trouble for life. But that is just speculation on my behalf.In May 2004 I was a new constable in the Metropolitan Police. Prior to that I had a career in photo and technical intelligence in the British Army and at Jane’s Defence Weekly.The Abu Ghraib abuse scandal had recently broken in the USA and the British press were in a race to get the first evidence of British troops doing the same. Propelled by the desire to have ‘Exclusive’ splashed in big letters on his newspaper, Morgan ‘found’ and led with these pictures. I saw them on a discarded copy on the tube going home from night shift.Now firstly in the name of balance - do I think British troops capable of beating and humiliating captured baddies and suspects? Yes of course. The British Army is perfectly capable of beating and humiliating its own soldiers, sometimes on purpose and sometimes just for kicks and giggles.My second night in Battalion and an old timer attacked me with a fire extinguisher - the wet end and the blunt force trauma end. The guy’s wanted to see what I was made of. He tried to drag me out into the open where a team of his drunken mates were waiting, I stood my ground and threw him out a window. It didn’t happen again for while - not until a very drunken 19 year old bet-wetting and recently divorced chap of high instinct and low intelligence used someone’s boot as a urinal and slapped it into my face while I slept. I held him by the neck and rearranged his bed space with his saggy body."Men can be highly civilized only while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them." George Orwell.I’ve done resistance to interrogation techniques and have been subjected to the very methods used at Abu Ghraib. Ironically we were ordered to undergo this stress test after warnings our dastardly enemies may use similar techniques. Anyone who’s met the ladies of the Intelligence Corps through a blindfold will be familiar with embarrassing operations in the nude.During rioting season in Northern Ireland it was quite common to find us brawling in the streets with all manner and flavour of scroat. Physical encouragement to follow the rules was common, but I have to say I never once saw Iraqi or Irish prisoner treated to the ritual humiliation in Piers Morgan’s pictures. Dead ones yes, but fucked-up-individuals aside, it’s not a warrior thing to beat down on a man who cannot defend himself.I don’t believe that eliminates the risk of such behaviour - there are many non-warriors in every army - but it is the standard we aspire to even if our workplace suggests otherwise.“The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility”. Admiral Jacky Fisher.Among ourselves, plenty of casual violence, but on the whole our training rammed it home that getting physical for fun with a suspect baddie in counter-insurgency operations like Northern Ireland or Basra would most likely lead to a court case and £30,000 going into the coffers of those trying to kill us. So screw the nut.(these aren't great examples, but I couldn't find bigger ones)So I looked at the pictures on the front cover of the Mirror in two minds - firstly ‘it was bound to happen, big machine, lots of boredom, lots of aggression and lots moving parts’ then I thought ‘what type of effing idiot takes pictures of themselves doing that!’ if they had been my men that’s why I would have wiped the floor with them.Then I started to look more closely at the composition of the pictures - these weren’t taken on operations in Iraq! Someone is being set up!The pictures purport to be of soldiers of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment with prisoners taken from an arrest operation in Basra during the invasion. They take place in the back of the truck - so one would assume en-route to the cells and before the arresting soldier’s day was over and he had time to change for dinner and a bit of prisoner abuse.Note how his ammunition pouches are empty! Operations in Basra would be hard enough without having anything to shoot back with.Note please how his webbing pouches aren’t done up! That sort of behaviour in the Army will get you more than urinated on. That’s a bit of physical encouragement to follow the rules coming your way courtesy of your corporal.Note how his uniform is devoid of sweat, sag, dust and his rolled sleeves are almost perfectly presented just above the elbow four inches deep - almost like he was on parade!Note how he isn't wearing body armour! Or helmet!The desert boots are again devoid of dust, dirt, sweat and grime as is the webbing! I served with the Guards - we’re famous for cleaning our boots, I mean really cleaning our boots - but that’s when we’re going on parade, not operations, certainly not our patrol rig, and not in the space between an arrest op and engaging in some ultra-violence with the locals.The rifle has no chipped metal work or scuffed furniture, I never saw one that didn’t. You certainly clean you weapon every day, but you don't get to paint it or sand down the furniture.Holding a rifle to the head of a blindfolded man isn't intimidating, not if he cant see the gun? That’s posing not abusing.The picture of the Hong Kong Phuey kick to the head, fails to show the kick connecting with the head - in court that would be inadmissible as evidence of assault. There is no sign of contact, the prisoner would’ve reacted to a boot in the face.Ditto the picture of the guy almost but not quite standing on the guy’s head.If you're urinating in full uniform you mostly have to undo your zip and get your penis out. Doing this wearing webbing and body amour is difficult at the best of times, it can be a scramble and causes shirts, keks, trousers and webbing to be hefted out of the way.But this guys trousers are tight across his hips, no sign of a penis (of which most soldiers are obscenely proud and not shy of displaying) and the flys and clothing do not seem undone. Again this would not constitute evidence of urination in court unless backed by other pictures.Then there was the vehicle the photos were taken in. If you were intent on a bit of loud, violent and illegal abuse of the sort you would get in trouble for, why would you do it protected by 1/8th of an inch of canvas. Trucks are usually kept places where there are lots of other people - streets, motor pools, the entrance to the cells. Not a discrete venue.Other have pointed out this is the back of a 4 Ton Bedford truck - most probably a series 4 - which they say was never deployed to Iraq as only TA units and army surplus had them in 2003/4.Some also say the weapon in the picture was an old SA80A1 with the round cocking handle not the A2 with the curved cocking handle. I don't remember and the photo isn't clear - but A1s weren’t deployed in infantry regiments in 2003/4. Its iffy, but from these pictures and my memory I cant remember which model it was.Then the most mysterious of issues - who took the picture? Why is it in black and white? Could that be because colour film would make it possible to deduce the strength, temperature and nature of the natural light?That could give clue to where the picture was taken? Northern Hemisphere or Arabian Gulf?The back of a truck can never be completely blacked out in daylight, the canvas is too thin. So was it taken at night? In which case where is the artificial light coming from - fluorescents, hurricane lamps, street lamps - a good analysis could tell you. Or was all this abuse done in complete darkness with only the flash for illumination?By and large soldiers don't go in for flash photography in combat areas. Puts the shits up too many people already on tenterhooks for attack.A digital camera photo would have EXIF data? That could give you excellent details like day, date, time and place? Whenever Police submit a digital photo of evidence it has to be on disc so this information can be checked.Believe it or not, Journalist’s are only supposed to run stories they can prove to the satisfaction of a court. The standards are supposed to be equal to a police investigation.Then there are the faces of the soldiers or lack of them. Not one identifiable face in all these photos. The one with the gun pointed at a blindfolded man's head. That wasn’t for the prisoners benefit, he couldn't see the gun, that is a solider posing for the camera. Only he took steps to keep his face out of the shot. Almost like he knew it was going to end up on the front page of newspaper and not some personal trove of war memorabilia.We’ve all seen posed pictures from combat - soldiers with dead enemy, with battle trophies, the pictures from Abu Ghraib. In all of them the solider’s face is the purpose of the shot, a portrait of survival and power. But not here?How did it come to be so crisply caught on film? What ordinary solider takes a 35mm, loads it with quick black and white film, fits and focuses a lens good enough to take an image indoors, in awkward light, and gets a series of perfectly crisp photos of the correct focal length, flash, exposure and shutter speed to grab a portrait, perfectly sized for a newspaper front page, from a fraction of a second in a supposedly dynamic and aggressive series of impromptu punishment beatings?That’s professional level photography there.When I carried the patrol camera it always carried colour film, noir looks good, but kills evidence. Film is bulky and hard to come by at the NAAFI even when it was popular. Carrying cameras is strictly controlled in the front line, a big bag full of 35mm accessories and a flash is going to get you noticed.There must be really good hobby photographers in the Army with all the gear and knowledge to take this pic, but not so many that every section has one on tap to cover impromptu illegal activities. If I was thinking of using these images as evidence in court, I would want to know the standard and experience of the photographer, to bat off questions from defence counsel about their quality.To date this information remains anonymous. The only person charged with the offence of making them, had his case thrown out as the Army couldn't prove most of their evidence. No trial for soldier said to have faked Iraq torture photos, this one is worth a read, all the way to the end.If I was planning on splashing them across the media - in full knowledge it would most likely result in increased attacks on British soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghan and most likely to inflame the considerable anger of home grown jihadis - if I was even slightly worried I was painting targets on the citizens of British cities - I might have spent a bit more time asking questions about the photographer and how he grabbed such incredibly well made pictures during a kicking in the back of a truck on operations.So after reading the article on the way back from night shift, I called up some people I had worked with at Channel 4 News, went down to their offices on Greyfriars and gave them my technical opinion of the photos. I wasnt alone by the end of the day other’s were offering opinions on their veracity.C4N ran with almost all of my analysis except the question over the employment status and quality of photographer. Even jackals don't eat their own.Piers Morgan defended the pictures over the next two weeks by claiming they came from anonymous sources within the Queen's Lancashire Regiment (look at the bit about Iraqi abuses). They countered the questions of veracity with anonymous quotes from soldiers named A and B, who still remain anonymous. Eventually the evidence against the pics became so thick it began to effect money and access, Morgan was kicked out and his replacement ran with…..Piers Morgan has never apologised and to this day states the photos were real.I have no doubt Iraqi prisoners got beat, it happens in every war - the dividing lines between physical encouragement, justified and reasonable force and assault are gossamer thin. But you need evidence, a court and a verdict before you can point fingers.Morgan points to the court martial of Donald Payne a corporal in the QLR who was found not guilty of manslaughter but pled guilty to ‘inhumane treatment of prisoners’ while in Iraq. Morgan says this proves he was right. Except Cpl Payne was not implicated in this series of photographs. His offences took place in the holding cells on a different day.It maybe that rumours of Cpl Payne reached the ears of the Mirror team, and Morgan was so keen on his own aspirations he arranged these photos. But I stress that’s my gut nothing evidential and experience.While on the news desks in 1998 I was sent to cover a farmer’s protest outside the Labour party conference. I watched as a tabloid photo journalist bought a group of Welsh Farmers drinks all morning. They were well lubricated by the time he came back and warned them ‘there are coppers in riot buses on the way, I’ve just been round the corner and they’re getting ready to rush you!‘It was complete rubbish, there were the same four cops behind a single barrier as there were that morning. The photographer had been faced with a minor bit of placard waving (worthless to a tabloid picture desk) and ramping it up to a farmer putting the boot into a copper (£5,000 to right buyer, £10K is there’s blood) was a better day’s work. He and a few other paparazzi got the hump with me as I challenged this - ‘what are you doing, we’re all on the same side!’ they tried to plead with me.The thing that skewers so many bent coppers, so many bent officials, is that once you’ve decided on and got conformable with the path of breaking rules, the rules necessary for the completion of the fraud become opaque.“The honest man takes pains and then enjoys pleasures; the knave takes pleasure and then suffers pains!”B.FranklinIn defence of the photos Morgan has said that various senior military officers have since come up to him and praised him for publishing the pics. He suggests the Generals in command at the time were thankful that he, a tabloid editor, had succeeded in exposing the brutality of their men, where they had been unable.I find this the zenith of Morgan’s insidious ego, and quite possibly the evidence of his political reach.I cannot imagine any officer thanking him for these pics, be they fake or real. Aside from the guaranteed kinetic reaction in Basra, it would be an admission of failure to install discipline, an admission of guilt, they still deny, that abuse was widespread and organised, they knew about it and were either complicit or incapable of ending it. And they would have been making this admission to a man with a known hotline to the front pages and no scruples to getting back on top.I gave up working on the news desks for the Police, as it was no job for a gentleman. Quality of service varies but there are rules. If you are planning on printing a story with tangible legal consequences, and they must have wondered if this headline would inspire an attack. You check from multiple sources, do your homework, you get a lawyer to check it, and you give the accused the right to reply, before publication.There are legions of soldiers who could have warned the Mirror about those unsecured pouches, who would have asked why they didn’t take their ammo on patrol. That alone should have been cause for concern, pause and wait until verified. The MoD certainly wasn’t going to make it easy to publish these photos, but if they were genuine there’s only so much they can do for so long to hide that.In fact if your tabloid hack feels the government is giving him the run around on his scoop, or better still making efforts to cover it up - he can take it to the opposition in parliament, get them to raise a juicy issue of conspiracy and squeeze another couple news cycles out of it.But Morgan, like Brooks at the News of the World thought themselves untouchable. They set agendas they didn’t follow them.They had a deeply corrupt intelligence gathering system at their disposal - that combined money and public image - they basked in the lack of oversight, checks, balances and made fun of the law. Senior officials were petrified of crossing them, because that’s where the money is. Not advertising and payroll - that's covers the little people. The money is in influence. Getting the drop on financial news and political action is a licence to print the stuff.Thats why I don't like him and many others like him.On 7th of July 2005 I was coming off night duty again on the tube at Cannon Street when a power surge stopped all the trains running. It turned out it was four homegrown suicide bombers. To be fair their list of grievances was extensive, but among them were the actions of British troops in Basra. Do you believe they believed it when the photos were proved fake?I was put on guard duty at the temporary mortuary on City Road. Our constant battle was stopping paparazzi tabloid photographers sneaking inside to get the ‘exclusive’ picture of the body parts laid out on the trolleys. One stole an NHS ambulance uniform and tried to sneak in. He spent the day in the cells.One colleague of mine was gay. He had an early gay dating app on his personal phone. On a normal week he might get half a dozen hits. The day he was on duty with me at City Road, he got dozens. Sensing something was amiss, he told our skipper who passed his phone up for analysis.Most of the hits were traced back to paparazzi and private detectives working for the tabloids. They figured a gay copper must be in the closet and susceptible to coercion. That was the response to 7/7 from the tabloids - a bitch fight over who got the bloodiest pictures at any cost.*Signs you may be a Psychopath - from Business InsiderA glibness and superficial charm.Grandiose sense of self-worth.Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom.Pathological lying. ...Cunning/manipulative. ...Lack of remorse or guilt. ...Shallow affect/emotional range. ...Callous/lack of empathy.'Mirror' editor Morgan sacked over fake photosThe fakes that finished an editor, and the truth that won't go awayDonald Payne (British Army soldier)Piers Morgan sacked from Daily MirrorEditor sacked over 'hoax' photos

Hahahahahahahaha, thanks for the A2A.For reasons that should be obvious (see my Bio), I’ve always had a connection to this book. It is an American literary classic for good reason. It is both a historical portrait of the American South and a compelling tale of fear, hatred, and injustice that is by no means applicable only to its country of origin. At its core, it is an examination of Humanity. I firmly believe that everyone should give it a good read.But everyone knows that it's about racism. If you only know one thing about it, you know that. I would like to point out a couple of less discussed aspects. I am assuming that the reader has already read the book, seen the film, or is at least familiar with the plot. If you're not, this won't make a ton of sense.One of my favorite parts is in Chapter 15. After Sheriff Tate warns Atticus that Tom Robinson is being moved to the County Jail and that a lynch mob should be expected, Atticus goes to guard the jailhouse door himself. Jem, Scout, and Dill sneak out after him. They witness four dusty cars pull up and see a group of men get out and order Atticus to move and let them go inside. It is at this moment that Scout decides to surprise her father by coming out and making her presence known. She recognizes one of the men in the lynch mob as the father of her classmate, Walter Cunningham.“Don’t you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I’m Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?” I began to sense the futility one feels when unacknowledged by a chance acquaintance.“I go to school with Walter,” I began again. “He’s your boy, ain’t he? Ain’t he, sir?”Mr. Cunningham was moved to a faint nod. He did know me, after all.“He’s in my grade,” I said, “and he does right well. He’s a good boy,” I added, “a real nice boy. We brought him home for dinner one time. Maybe he told you about me, I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it. Tell him hey for me, won’t you?”Scout continually fails to recognize the gravity of the situation and keeps trying to make polite conversation with Mr Cunningham despite the fact that he is trying his best to ignore her. It is this, in the end, that saves the lives of both Tom Robinson (temporarily) and her father.Atticus said nothing. I looked around and up at Mr. Cunningham, whose face was equally impassive. Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders.“I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady,” he said.Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. “Let’s clear out,” he called. “Let’s get going, boys.”As they had come, in ones and twos the men shuffled back to their ramshackle cars. Doors slammed, engines coughed, and they were gone.This gets to the heart of many of the problems that arise from the anonymity that the Internet provides us today. It shows the reason why I think Quora’s Real Name Policy is important. People have a much harder time being evil when they know that their name and reputation in the greater community is at stake. Oscar Wilde said “give a man a mask and he will show you his true face”, but I think that is a bit of an idealistic way of thinking today. I have witnessed first hand that giving a person a mask can sometimes encourage them to experiment with kinds of evil that they never would have touched otherwise. Maybe Wilde was right and the true faces of humanity are just far more hideous than we like to imagine, but I am personally hesitant to lose my faith in the species.Or at least I want to be.I also find a great sadness and despair attached to the book now that I am aware just how little has changed in the very place it describes.Maycomb County, Alabama, where the narrative is set, may be fictional but it is based upon the real Monroe County, Alabama, where Harper Lee was born and raised. Her home town of Monroeville was also where the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird was filmed and the book is the city’s greatest pride.The city of Monroeville is also the place where Walter McMillian was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to Death Row decades after the book earned the town the title, “Literary Capital of Alabama”. The similarities between the case of Walter McMillian and Tom Robinson are shocking and stand as a testament to just how little most people learn from literature. It is heavily documented in the book Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson, who works for the Equal Justice Initiative and whose services as a lawyer led to the exoneration of an innocent man who was almost executed.Everyone should read that book. It is amazing. I’ll do my best to accurately summarize the case here. All of the following information is factual.Walter McMillian was a black man who made a good living in the pulpwood industry, enough to make him one of the more financially independent residents of the very poor Monroe County. In the 1980s, he had an affair with a married white woman named Karen Kelly. When her husband found out that she had been unfaithful-and with a black man no less-he publicly divorced and disgraced her. She eventually turned to drugs and crime. It was at this point in her life that she met Ralph Myers, a habitual criminal and fellow social outcast whose face had been severely burned in a childhood fire and left him scarred, ugly, and deeply pyrophobic.But that's just the background. The case in question focused on the murder of Ronda Morrison on November 1, 1986.Ronda Morrison was shot to death while working at Jackson Dry Cleaners in the middle of town on a busy Saturday morning. The county sheriff, Tom Tate (yes the Monroe county sheriff is actually named Tate, just like in the book-I told you the similarities were shocking) had only recently been elected to the position and found himself under a great deal of pressure to find a suspect for the murder, as people were unwilling to accept that a daylight murder in the center of town could be unsolvable, but no leads presented themselves.Eventually the police found their way to Ralph Myers who, for reasons that are very difficult to understand, said that he knew who had killed her. The first person he named turned out to have been in a jail cell at the time of the murder. The second person he named was a high ranking member of the police force of a neighboring county and it quickly became clear that the charges wouldn't stick. Running out of options and with the pressure mounting on him, Myers said that it had been the black man with whom Karen Kelly had been intimate. The police had the suspect they wanted.At the time that the murder took place, Walter McMillian was hosting a church fish fry at his house. He had literally dozens of witnesses who could confirm that he was there, one of whom was a police officer who had made note of the occasion in his official records. Sheriff Tate knew that it would be hard to make an arrest for murder without any concrete evidence, so they looked again to Myers for any other charges that could be grounds for arrest. Myers threw a new twist into his ever changing story and said that Walter had also raped him. Sodomy, even when consensual, was illegal in Alabama until 2014 and the Monroe County police were able to arrest Walter McMillian, helped by the fact that Mr McMillian was initially unable to deny the charges as he didn't know what sodomy meant.Once the investigation of Walter McMillian began, several inmates already serving prison terms were given the opportunity to reduce their sentences if they would testify that Walter was the killer. Several men jumped at the opportunity and the case was built, but with a sudden hitch. Ralph Myers recanted his testimony, saying he was unwilling to participate in the conviction of an innocent man. Both he and McMillian, who had still not been tried, were put on Death Row, a move never before done to a pre-trial suspect. Myers’ cell was close enough to the execution chamber that the man who had a deep fear of fire since childhood could smell the burning flesh of the executed. Sheriff Tate gave Myers a simple choice: either testify against McMillian, who Tate knew to be innocent, or be executed for the crime himself. After days of extreme depression and fits of shaking and under extreme duress, Ralph Myers agreed to falsely accuse him of murder.The trial of Walter McMillian lasted only a day and a half. The jury that convicted him recommended a sentence of life in prison but, as allowed by Alabama State Law, judge Robert E Lee Key Jr chose to ignore the jury recommendation and sentenced him to death. Walter McMillian appealed his sentence several times without success until the Equal Justice Initiative successfully brought about his legal exoneration in 1993, after Walter McMillian had spent more than six years of his life on Death Row awaiting execution.Okay, are you ready for the worst part?As of the writing of this answer (December 10, 2016), Thomas Tate, who knowingly falsified evidence and used his position as sheriff to secure, through intimidation, false testimony with the aim of executing a man he KNEW to be innocent in order to save his own personal reputation, IS STILL THE SHERIFF OF MONROE COUNTY, ALABAMA.Monroe County - Alabama Sheriffs Association - AlabamaSince reading Mr Stevenson’s excellent book, I cannot read To Kill a Mockingbird the same way. Do not make the mistake of believing that it is a picture of a past America that no longer exists. The portrait it paints of society is like that of Dorian Gray: it can be a mask that we use to hide the true hideous face of our society while patting ourselves on the back for the progressive nature of our literature.Racism is still alive and well in America. We need people of Atticus Finch’s character now more than ever.Thank you for reading. I hope I’ve given this book a little bit of added perspective.